Developing Products With Trust

How To Move Fast

Hey There,

Welcome back to a Tuesday post that is dedicated to product development in the chemical industry. I was planning on writing something else today, but this concept of trust hit me today while I was working and it wasn’t necessarily an epiphany moment, but perhaps a moment of clarity. 

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When I was early in my career post PhD I was working at a division of Hexion, now known as Bakelite Synthetics, and the first career development training we had centered around trust. The seminar was put on by the Franklin Covey foundation (company?) and at the time I thought, “wow, this is so corny.” We went through a bunch of exercises about gaining someone’s trust after losing it and I went through the motions with everyone else. But after the last six years it was probably the best corporate training session I’ve ever experienced.

When you develop a new product or redesign an existing one there are a lot of unknowns out there. Particularly right now, I suspect there are a lot of cross functional teams out there trying to figure out how to alleviate supply chain issues and reduce raw material costs. As always there is a timeline with milestones you need to achieve and that timeline feels like it’s never enough time.

In an ideal world speed in product development comes from teams with a high level of trust. A team with a high level of trust is able to voice concerns early, often, and without precise language. There is often minimal fear of offending someone and an idea or concern that sounds awful might lead to a solution and a patent. 

Functional groups that are significantly siloed or have difficulty communicating with each other often do not possess a high level of trust. Here is a classic example of how a conversation between and R&D person and a sales person goes: 

Sales: Hey R&D, how is that project for our customer going?

R&D: It’s been great. I think I’ve made a real breakthrough. I figured out that if you do X and then Y we get Z. We just need to figure out how to scale it up. Just don’t tell anyone yet.

Sales: Yeah, sure of course. This is great news.

2 weeks later

Sales: Hey, so I told my boss who told our customer about that breakthrough you had. They want samples like right now. Can you get kilogram samples for them in the next few weeks shipped?

R&D: I still haven’t figured out how to scale it up yet. I told you not to tell anyone.

Sales: I’m sorry, but this project now has a lot of visibility with senior management. This could be huge for us this year.

This exchange is clearly not real, but I’ve seen similar situations play out and it exemplifies a common theme I hear in R&D: “Don’t tell sales anything.” This attitude or culture is due to a lack of trust. Clearly the sales person broke their word and is in the wrong here. I’ve seen similar situations play out with other functions such as R&D telling the operations team prior to a production run that “this will work. It’s gonna be fine,” and then it’s anything but fine.

Talking across functions is more productive if we are being honest even if it’s painful to our egos. That person in sales might be behind on hitting their numbers for the year and needs a big win to stay employed. The R&D person might be getting pushed to deliver something to a customer on a tight deadline and hasn’t done all the needed work prior to trying to hand it off to operations. Discussing problems and concerns upfront is difficult because it comes from a place of vulnerability.

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Getting problems, risks, and concerns out in the open early and often is critical if you want to deliver on time and in full with your product. You get there through trusting your coworkers. When the whole team knows they are taking a chance on a particular path and it doesn’t work then the team wins and loses collectively. If the team fails then there is probably a back-up plan too.

You Know When You Don’t Have It

Without trust, organizations tend to devolve into political nightmares. When things don’t work finger pointing occurs and sometimes years of work just fizzle out. When things do work everyone wants to take credit with the executives. If you have a team member who feels they didn’t get credit there then it can feel like a betrayal. Victory isn’t victory unless the team wins together.

I often find when my projects are moving along just fast enough or faster than I expected it’s because people decided to trust me and I decided to trust them. It’s easy to talk about problems or issues when you trust your team members. It’s easier to move fast when information is shared amongst the team members.

In my example above the sales person should be communicating about why they need an update on project progress. It’s easier to communicate the results and the risks if it’s a project update as opposed to an ambush in the hallway. Typically, there should be a project manager focused on facilitating those conversations, but sometimes there are no project managers.

If you feel like you are drowning in mistrust I suggest you be the change you want to see in the world. Start attempting to have open honest conversations with your coworkers and let them know you are trusting them when you might not have originally. Maybe your projects will develop some operational speed and when your team succeeds its easy to get recognition.

Tony